SRINAGAR: At least 500 people in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) have been detained by police investigating a spate of targeted killings by suspected rebels, officials told international news agency AFP on Sunday.
Assailants fatally shot three Hindus and a Sikh person in the region’s main city of Srinagar this week in a sudden rise in violence against civilians. Local police have blamed the spate of killings on elements fighting against Indian rule in the region for decades.
Police say individuals belonging to The Resistance Front (TRF) group have shot and killed seven people since last week, pushing up the death toll from such attacks this year to 28 people. While 21 of those slain were Muslims, seven of them belonged to Hindu and Sikh minority communities.
The latest deaths were two teachers from the minority Sikh and Hindu communities, who were shot by gunmen at a government-run school in Srinagar on Thursday.
Taking to journalists, the region’s top police officer Dilbag Singh described the killings as a “conspiracy to create terror and communal rift”. A top anti-terrorism intelligence officer was sent by New Delhi to the occupied region to head up the investigation.
On Thursday, TRF in a statement on social media claimed the group was targeting those working for Indian authorities and was not picking targets based on faith. The group’s statement could not be independently verified.
The TRF was formed after India stripped IoK in 2019 of its semi-autonomous status, scrapped its statehood, and undertook a massive security and communications lockdown for months.
According to police, those detained in the ensuing crackdown include members of religious groups, anti-India activists and “overground workers”, a term Indian authorities use for sympathisers and collaborationists of freedom fighters.
